31 December 2012

Dear Reader, I so hope you had a loving Christmas and a
lot of good food to go with it. Did you? I made a ham roast with maple
syrup bacon crust, there was a lot of it, and it was nice. I didn't know
a girl can eat a multi-pound ham joint practically by herself. Anthony
caught a stomach bug and spent Christmas Eve squarely sick, poor thing,
so I had to do all the eating. No complaints. But quick, quick, 2012 is
nearly out of the door, it goes so fast, I can barely believe it, not
enough time for a lengthy talk now, no way, the boom-booms of early fireworks can already be heard all over the city. And what
did I do with these twelve short months? Well, yes, I finally went to see my family after a hundred, no, two and a half years of apart-ness; I
put strawberries in my spaghetti; I got married. There was a crayon of
every color in the box, the darkest one included. But digress shall I
now not, need to keep it brief, yes sir.

I was on my bicycle pedaling hurriedly to work the other day -- I
think Thursday after Christmas that was -- at an ungodly hour of 6 a.m. I
dodged however little traffic there was on the roads at the time,
whooshing past red-eyed traffic lights like rules are not for me.
Running a light at one intersection, I noticed something that caught me
in my tracks. The yellow round face of the moon hung so low it seemed to
be resting in the crooked arms of the barren trees. The Rijksmuseum's
spikes glistened in the inky sky in the distance, the whole building all
of a sudden looking like a castle. The soft, golden lights strewn
around a towering pine tree ahead of me swayed gently in the wind. I go
the same route almost every day, yet I never saw anything like it
before. The darkness, the moon, the lights, the trees, all seemed so out
of this world for a second, as if an illustration from a fairy tale
book came to life -- or I felt like I was in the book. Every year a
child in me expects to see a glimpse of magic at Christmas and New
Year's, and that moment, in the middle of a city, was that. It enchanted
me. It's been days since then, and I'm still thinking about that view
and about that feeling. Where am I driving at? Here: I wish us all for
the nascent year a swath of breathtaking moments in life's
everyday-ness. That and time and insight to notice them all.

Happy New Year, Dear Reader. Happy 2013.

As for today's recipe, well, it's a soup, but a very good soup, worth to be talked about on New Year's Eve.

It's
a little firework of a soup, in that it's exciting and familiar at the
same time. There is pumpkin that you roast first to lay upon it more
flavor. Then, there are spices: cinnamon and dried chili. And then,
there is a whole lot of fresh cilantro (coriander). In between, there
are deeply caramelized onions and a swatch of garlic. The ingredients
and flavors are all usual kitchen dwellers, but together and in the form
of a soup they speak an exotic dialect.

I use much less cinnamon than prescribed in the original, because, in my
humble opinion, you don't need as much as half a teaspoon of cinnamon
in your soup.

I like it served plain, maybe with a sprinkling of
toasted pine nuts and a scattering of more fresh cilantro, but you can
up the game and drown a dollop of good-quality Greek yogurt (thinned
with a bit of milk) in your bowl. Go ahead, suit yourself.

Toss
the pumpkin with 2 tablespoons of the olive oil, a healthy pinch of
salt and some black pepper, and spread it out in a roasting tin. Roast
for about 20-30 minutes, until very soft and starting to color. Remove
out of the oven and set aside.

Heat the remaining 4 tablespoons of the olive oil in a large
saucepan over medium-low heat. Add the onion and a pinch of salt; cook for
about 15 minutes, stirring occasionally, until the onion begins to turn
nice and golden. If the onion browns too fast, scale the heat down a notch. Add the garlic, cinnamon and chili, and fry for another
minute to release their flavor. Add the roasted pumpkin, the potato and
the stock, and bring to a gentle simmer. Cook for about 20 minutes or
until the potato is soft. Remove from the heat and throw in the
cilantro.

With a handheld mixer or in a food processor, blitz the soup until
smooth. Check for seasoning and adjust to taste. You may want to add a
tiny spritz of fresh lemon juice to the lot to brighten things up a bit.

5 December 2012

Never in my life I
wrote you a letter before, and now that it's been three months since
you are gone I can't help it. I still can't accept the fact that you are
no more. There are many things I want to tell you now, but nothing is
more important than this: I love you. Hard to tell what's gnawing at me
more now: the fact that I didn't tell you as much when you were there to
hear it or that I'll never, not in this lifetime, be able to again. I
was thousands of miles away when you left. You went so quickly. That
time when I hugged you goodbye this May, I should have hugged you more, I
should have said I love you. After my mother called to tell me you'd
left, I went out onto my balcony and looked up at the sky. It was dusky
and the air was smoky, fluffy clouds unhurriedly drifting across the
lavender sky. I watched planes ascending, and a few bird flocks heading
somewhere far. I kept thinking, looking, even, where amidst all those
clouds and birds and planes you may be now, the images getting distorted
and blurry from tears.

You ended but I have yet to visit your grave. And your home. It must
be so empty of you there now. Before, you would be in your kitchen
hunching over your flower pots or shredding cabbage for your signature
sauerkraut with redcurrant berries, or in your living room reorganizing
your limitless cache of medicine or reading a history book with a
magnifying glass, stating loudly it's not working but turning page after
page after page. Today, no one there. Your winter coat and a couple
dresses must be hanging purposelessly in your wardrobe, sharing spare
space with this summer's jams and jars of pickles (you and your canned
goods!). I can't believe you are gone. I know you are, yet in
some sort of a haze I sometimes secretly dial your number to see that
maybe, just maybe, you would pick up and ask when I would come to visit
and I would loudly say that I would come soon, please wait for me.

I've told Anthony so many stories about you. His favorite is that
about your two names. He finds it incredulous that when for some reason
you had to renew your passport in your mid-thirties, a consulate clerk
told you she didn't know of such name as Aglaya and so she typed in Alla
instead. You said you didn't want to waste more time to re-new your
renewed passport and carried on -- so nonchalant! -- with Aglaya, or
Glanya, for us and Alla for everybody else. And everybody else it was. I
recall running errands with you. It seemed that every other passer-by
was somebody you knew, a former colleague, a friend, a friend of a
friend, an old neighbor. You stopped for a hello, how's life? with everyone.

It snowed here today. Winter holidays are coming up. I miss
the way we used to celebrate. Annually, we would have you over at my
parents' place for New Year's, and come Christmas, January 7th,
we would all go to you for a flamboyant meal. Even these years when you
grew weaker and weaker to cook, the table still moaned under all that
food: herring, boiled potatoes, shashlik(cooked on an upright grill set up right on the table!), chicken tabaka, pickled wild mushrooms, salad olivier,napoleon cake, and so much more.
I loved it all, except for what had mayonnaise and sour cream, but your
fresh cabbage salad was the best thing in the world for me. You turned
that tight-lipped cabbage so juicy, and you could cut it into paper-thin
shreds even with the dullest of knives. Utterly delectable. At the
table I always chose a seat closest to that glass bowl, the one with
tiny spikes on the outside, you used to pile the salad into. A week
later, on the eve of Old New Year,
my mother and I would come over, and the three of us would spend the
night forecasting our fortune. We each burnt a piece of paper on an
upended saucer, and after the flame had ceased we had to make out what
exactly the shadow from the paper's silhouette resembled. I remember the
shadow often looked like a standing bear, but I don't recall what it
meant. Or candle wax, we would hold a lit candle over a bowl of cold
water to see what shape molten wax will form into. Mostly it would coil
into bizarre abstractions, but occasionally we could see a tea cup, an
open book or a horse. One time we tried the cards -- they said you
would live to see your ninetieth. Grandma, you came only six years
short.

1/2 small to medium white cabbage, outer leaves and core removed1/2 tsp table salt1/2 medium carrot, coarsely grated1 medium to large apple (such as Jonagold or Golden Delicious), peeled, cored and coarsely grated1 tsp apple cider vinegar2 Tbsp olive oilfreshly ground black pepper, to tastea small handful of finely chopped fresh dillSlice
the cabbage as thin as you can. Place in a large bowl, add the salt and
mix by hand for a minute, kneading and crushing the cabbage to release
the juices. Add the rest of the ingredients and mix well. Adjust the
seasoning, if needed, and serve.

A few words

Hello, I am Anya Sokha (32). I am Russian, and Amsterdam, the Netherlands is my current home. Here I have been busying myself with various things, such as getting a master’s degree in English linguistics (finished!); being a bread baker (an apprentice before, and a dish-washer before that) in a French-style bakery; and figuring out where I should go next.

Godful Food has nothing to do with church and such. I made the word 'godful' up to show that food and writing are my religion. I was trying to be clever or something.